Headline: Towering Trump – the tycoon is big on himself and it has paid handsomely, but what can he do for the people?

He sits entirely still, impassive, not a muscle moving, not a wrinkle in his perfect appearance, his face as pressed as his suit. He mesmerises his prey like a snake about to strike. For underneath that stillness is a demonic power and energy waiting to spring.

Donald Trump is New York. Glitz, greed, glamour and an ambition so colossal that it will probably not rest until he rules the world – which one day he just might. At 41 he owns vast chunks of Manhattan’s prime real estate, the best hotels, the biggest casinos in Atlantic City, huge realms in Palm Beach and much more. He is the toughest, the fastest, operator in the city, and probably, says his biography, the world. He’s as sharp as a gold-plated razor-blade.

He sells himself, like everything belonging to him, very big indeed. Now his autobiography is America’s bestselling book for the last five years. It has been number one on the bestseller list since December and his London publishers are reprinting already, in publication week. He boasts that other tycoons’ books don’t sell. ‘And I want you to know I wrote this book, I myself,’ he says.

But what of Tony Schwartz, his literary collaborator? There is something odd about it, for Tony Schwartz, a contributing editor at New York Magazine, is the writer who wrote a great front cover expose of one of Trump’s harsher deals which involved the attempted winkling of tenants in a block Trump wanted to redevelop. In the book this incident is seen in quite another light. How did Schwartz turn poacher? Trump gives just the faintest hint of a shrug, not enough to disorder the cut of his shoulders. ‘He has a business ability,’ he explains, which has a ring of truth in it. ‘He catches the cadence of my voice.’

Sitting in the foyer before the interview, his high-powered PA has just told me that she wants me to know that: ‘Mr Trump is a genuine human being. He is a warm and caring person.’ He tells me too how much he does for charity. Indeed, he does. The whole of New York society and much of business operates around charity. It is the instant way in for the parvenu. What’s good about New York is there is no such thing as new money. Money is just money, without the need to launder it for a couple of generations. You don’t have to join the Freemasons you just buy into Dollars 10,000 a plate dinners for Cerebral Palsy or restoration of the Cathedral of St John the Divine.

‘It’s all a game. I’m young, and I’m just coming up to the best part.’ Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

His book, Trump: The Art Of The Deal, is a fascinating read. It is the story, (or more probably, a very small part of the story) of how he made it. It describes the deals in which he always comes out top. Even when he seems to lose, at the last minute he comes out the winner. It is flamboyantly exuberant and it offers the illusion that it’s easy. It seems to tell you how it’s done. It turns the entrepreneur into a modern hero, a Wild West pioneer, a conquistador, a Cecil Rhodes, told like the Edwardians wrote of the empire-builders for schoolboy hero-worshippers. There are no values but victory, no goals beyond winning. Trump titillates the greed nerves without shame or doubt.

In Britain this will be seen as a rivetting curiosity from an alien culture. It is exactly what we think of New York. It will satisfy our sense of moral superiority and old-world decency. It makes our new spirit of entrepreneurialism look a poor pale bloodless thing. This week it was reviewed by John Harvey-Jones, one of our most distinguished and successful industrialists. He looked down on Trump with a witty, amused, and very British distaste. Trump read the review with some puzzlement.

In one deal in the book, Trump describes the handshake with a real old-world gentleman – a handshake that cost the poor gentleman a lot of new world money. Harvey-Jones pulls out this incident as an emblem of Trump’s style of doing business.

‘I didn’t understand that,’ Trump said, aggrieved. ‘I really respected that honorable man. I respect a man of his word for whom a handshake is enough.’ But, I point out, it was his honour that did him in on this deal. ‘Look, that honorable man is a millionaire a hundred times over, and he’s made more money than your Harvey-Jones ever has, so what does he know? Your country’s distaste for success is a national disease.’ The whole point of the book and its remarkable adventures is that when each deal is struck someone loses out badly. ‘That’s wheeling and dealing,’ he says with a faint smile.

He lives in the top three floors of Trump Tower, his first great Manhattan development, a magnificent mirror-glass 68-floor monument to showy flamboyance. It has a gigantic rose-marbled atrium and huge green trees growing up platforms on its facade hundreds of feet up in the sky. His wife, Ivana, is an ex-Olympic skier, ex-model, something of a Trump tower herself, famed for her astounding couture wardrobe. She runs some of his hotels and casinos with a rod of iron that is lovingly admired in the book. It is said that for tax purposes he gives her only a dollar a year, and all the dresses she can buy. Most of his book, and his reputation is built on the property deals he started out with. Now the greatest part of his wealth comes from his many casinos.

If I want to be President, then I’ll be President

So what do you do when you’re only 41 and you have made more money than you could ever spend? He is lionised in a city of lions. People try to touch him in the street, as if some of the gold might come off, the Man with the Midas Fist. ‘What else is there?’ he asks. ‘It’s all a game. I’m young, and I’m just coming up to the best part.’

Maybe now, I naively suggest, he can apply his talents to solving the appalling problems of the city he half owns? Even as his ten million dollar apartments multiply, just around the corner is the West’s worst squalor, danger, decay and disgrace. If he’s looking for new challenges, they are all around him. He has, after all, just taken on the renovation of the Wollman Ice Skating Rink in Central Park, which had run into such catastrophic problems under mismanagement by the city council. He couldn’t bear to watch it out of his window, so he did it himself, to resounding applause and adulation. Had that given him a taste for taking on New York’s disaster areas?

‘Challenges?’ he said. As people always do, I had underestimated the scope of his ambition. It certainly wasn’t centred on solving New York’s housing crisis. ‘I hate what’s happening to this country,’ he says, with a trace of fervour. ‘We’re getting kicked around by the Japanese, and they’re making the United States look foolish. Our politicians don’t know what they’re doing. Japan is shaming us out of our dignity. They are buying up everything. So is Europe and the United States is becoming the whipping post of its allies.’ So the carefully placed rumours are true, Donald J Trump does want to stand for President? The faintest of smiles: ‘Not for a period but I am involved politically. You could do it from where I am.’ It is said he once said: ‘If I want to be President, then I’ll be President.’

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He is beginning now to sound approximately like a politician. What would his platform be? ‘Respect,’ he says and pauses heavily. ‘Respect.’ He sounds like the Godfather. ‘We’re a second rate economic power, a debtor nation. We’re getting kicked around.’ I try to imagine the kind of deals he would make with Gorbachev, and fail. I choose an issue. What would he do about Iran, for instance? ‘I’d be harsh on Iran. They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools. One bullet shot at one of our men or ships and I’d do a number on Kharg Island. I’d go in and take it. Iran can’t even beat Iraq, yet they push the United States around. It’d be good for the world to take them on.’

He is enough of a politician to be polite about George Bush. He says, politely, that the man is not such a wimp as he’s made out. Bush has been unfairly traduced by the media. But he says it in a way that makes it plain Bush is still a wimp. Could Trump possibly make it to the White House? Of course not, says everyone who knows anything about American politics. It’s a bad joke. But then Trump has often done what can’t be done and if the White House can take a senile movie star, why not a casino operator?

Trump’s is not a rags to riches story. His father was a small time low-rent developer in Queens. But Donald Trump did not enjoy rent-collecting in areas where you had to stand the right side of the door in order not to get shot. But his father gave him the basic skills, taught him about building, and contractors, buying and selling. He was sent to the New York Military Academy, where he came out captain of the cadets of his year. He went to Wharton School of Finance, where he is now in the Hall of Fame, but says the degree was only useful in impressing people with his respectable credentials. He put together his first deals by sheer bravado. He had nothing, no office, a tiny shabby apartment, but daring and brashness of breathtaking scope, with promises and other people’s money.

What is he doing here in London? Certainly not promoting his book, since he agreed to only two interviews. Is he going to buy us up, too? ‘It’s a great city. It’s beginning to generate some new energy. I’m looking. If the right opportunity comes along, I’ll make a move.’